


saltwater

by aperfectsong



Series: backbone [2]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Pre-Season/Series 01, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 22:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5887594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperfectsong/pseuds/aperfectsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At school, sometimes, Logan walks through the halls and forgets where he’s going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	saltwater

At school, sometimes, Logan walks through the halls and forgets where he’s going.

It is sophomore year. Lilly has been dead for two months.

He can’t remember what period it is and when he looks at the clock, he can read it, but it doesn’t make sense to him. It feels like a clock would in a dream – showing only times or days that don’t even exist, like the thirty-third of November or red o’clock.

It doesn’t feel real that someone murdered his girlfriend, that someone hit her over the head with a fucking ashtray, dislodging bits of her scalp and flakes of bone and too much blood. He saw the crime scene video a week earlier and now, he can’t un-see it: Lilly, lying there, done. Her eyes are looking off at someone no longer there. He can’t even remember her now without seeing it—not in the pool house between his sheets, or teasing Duncan on the bleachers after school, or driving the three of them to the mall because she decided Ronnie needed a makeover. He sees her dead face in his windshield when he thinks _the songs she used to love are too old for the radio_. Now there are new songs: songs she probably would have loved, but will never hear and will never sing along with.

Her absence still feels like a presence. Like, it isn’t so much that she isn’t there—but that the void where she is supposed to be is too big, like it’s its own separate thing, like a big shadow. He tries to tell Duncan at his locker, but then, Logan’s standing there alone and he can’t remember where he is supposed to be. Then he remembers he’s probably high.

 

 

Then it is Tuesday, mid-January and he is waiting outside Miss James’ office when someone pushes the door open so hard he has to move out of the way.

“Whoa, take it easy,” he says.

But it’s Veronica fucking Mars.

They recognize each other in the same moment and turn away. Still, the image of her stays with him after he closes the door. He hasn’t talked to her, not really, since the day in the computer lab where he made her choose sides. Back then, her father was still the sheriff and she was a different person. Her dad was already ruining the best family Logan ever knew. He thinks then of how Lilly might still be alive if Veronica wasn’t such a rat and it makes him start to sweat, like anywhere there is to go is too warm.

“Did you and Veronica have a falling out?” Miss James asks him after he closes the door.

“Does watching the news interfere with your job? Or does the school not pay you enough to buy a decent TV?” he says.

As usual, Miss James doesn’t take his bait by showing any sort of emotional response. He has to admire her poker face, but it isn’t blank, just tired.

“Everyone handles their grief in different ways,” she says simply. “But I didn’t like the look on your face.”

“Are we here to talk about Veronica Mars, or Lilly Kane?” Logan asks, leaning back in his chair and hooking his left ankle over the opposite knee.

“We’re here to talk about you,” she says. Miss James looks down at her notes. “Last time we talked about surfing. You said it clears your head. Have you been out lately?”

Logan shrugs.

Lately, he’s been staying up too late in the pool house with Dick or Duncan or Enbom or whoever is around, skimming vodka off the bottles in the bar and topping them with water. Another thing Lilly taught him. Sometimes one of the guys brings something else over.  Sometimes he finds something no one around his house will miss. They get stupid and watch something that comes on TV and sleep it off until it’s too late to go surfing. They go to the beach anyway because it’s somewhere else to be.

“Yeah,” he lies.

 

 

In March, he is suspended for two days for fighting some freshmen whose name he doesn’t even know. It all happened so fast, he doesn’t even remember why. He just can’t calm himself down. His dad is gone to film some shitty movie with a shittier plot, so Logan plays Mortal Kombat on Super Nintendo until he unlocks all of the characters. Lilly would make fun of him, but she’d always play, smashing the buttons haphazardly, getting combinations by chance. She’d always choose the sluttiest-looking character and sometimes he’d let her win just so he could watch her gloat. He thinks of her, gloating, climbing into his lap, but then there’s the blood and the part of her head where pieces are missing. He can’t even fantasize about her.

 

 

In April, Counselor Becky asks him, “Have you found anything else that serves as an outlet to your grief?”

“Is that from the questionnaire?” Logan asks with a smirk.

“It is,” she admits. “Grief counselors with more experience than me have found that questions about how you deal can help you think about the future.”

He wants to say drinking, but knows she will call his mom. Besides, drinking makes him numb, makes everything seem far away. It isn’t an outlet.

So he tells her he doesn’t know.

She asks if he’s been thinking about colleges. Duncan has a plan. Shelley, Madison, and Enbom. Even Dick has a plan. But Logan never really had a plan, even before Lilly. Now, he has a hard time finding the motivation to do anything. Homework? Who the fuck cares?

Miss James takes out a stack of pamphlets and they spend the next minutes sorting through them. She writes down the names of the schools he doesn’t discard. She lets him take the pamphlets though he will stick in the top section of his locker, underneath his textbooks and extra notebooks, and not see them again until he cleans out his locker at the end of the year.

 

 

In May, before school lets out for summer break, he tells Miss James, “I sometimes feel like if I’m not sad about it, or if I’m not thinking about it, it means I didn’t really love her.”

Miss James puts on a sympathetic face and meets Logan’s eyes over the desk. “Lilly wouldn’t want you to waste your life mourning for her.”

Then Logan is laughing, catching himself and Miss James by surprise.

“Did you even know Lilly?” he asks her.

 

 

All summer, it doesn’t matter where he goes or what he drinks. There’s a point each day where his phone rings and he thinks it’s her, or where he hears her voice, but when he turns to look its coming from someone else’s body. The weird part is that it comforts him sometimes. Other times it pisses him off. Other times it makes him feel crazy.

He misses Lilly. So he wraps himself around Caitlin, or whoever.

He hates himself. So he makes it his personal mission to destroy Veronica Mars. So he pisses off his dad and pays for it. So he pisses off his best friend and doesn’t.

Everything goes by too slowly until finally the summer is over.

 

 

 

Then he is a junior. Like Lilly was last year. He thinks she will always be a junior - always applying to colleges that will take her far away from her mother, always teasing Logan about the boys she is going to meet. He hasn’t filled out any applications. He hasn’t made a list. He hasn’t even decided what he wants to study. Duncan applies to colleges and universities that probably would only accept Logan if his application arrived with a generous donation from the Aaron Echolls fund.

In English class, when he is supposed to write his personal statement, he makes a list of all the things he doesn’t want to be and all the places doesn’t want to go: actor, engineer, teacher, Iceland, Alabama, until the pages is filled with words that mean nothing to him.

Lilly’s locker now belongs to a freshman boy with acne scars.

He talks to Miss James. This makes him feels worse and better at the same time: spent, empty, unburdened. It is as though after he says them aloud, he can let go of some of the thoughts he keeps trying to remember. He just doesn’t know what to do with how it all feels without her, like everything is monochrome, and the only way he can get the color back is by taking things a little too far: smashing Veronica’s headlights, drinking on school property, picking fights because he doesn’t care, giving everybody shit to see how they respond.

 

 

It’s September, almost a year since Lilly died. Logan and Duncan beat the sun to the coast with enough time to spare for coffee. Logan finds himself wondering what she would be doing if she were alive: calling him late at night after a day she forgot to take her Prozac, using his room to change into her bikini and leaving her underwear under his pillow, throwing parties with E when her parents are in LA for the weekend, calling Ronnie’s new look too goth, saying stupid shit to piss her mom off and leaving Duncan to defend her while she takes her car and drives and drives.

The coffee makes thoughts like this race through Logan’s head too fast to feel any one of them. It makes them harder to hold in place, harder to fixate on; this is the way he likes it.

Duncan no doubt heard about Veronica’s car the day before, about the PCHers and his bloody nose, but he hasn’t said anything.  Instead, he holds the steering wheel with one hand and squints at the coastline.

“Looks good today,” he says. Logan nods sleepily and presses his forehead to the glass.

They don’t do this every day; not even most days, but the days when Logan needs control, needs the feeling that expands in his chest in the moments the ocean makes him feel like flying. He has the sense that Duncan needs it too.

They come alive as the car crunches sand, as Duncan slows and parks, as they take their boards out of the pack, leaving footprints in the sand, as they paddle out, as the cool water wraps itself around them, bending to accommodate them.

It isn’t until he is about to stand that Logan fully wakes into himself, until his energy and body focus on a single purpose. When he’s on the water, he doesn’t think _Lilly is dead._ He doesn’t feel so angry at everyone: at himself, at Lilly for dying, at Veronica for breaking them up almost a year ago or for choosing her father over them, at Duncan for becoming this shitty version of himself, at Sheriff Mars for making everything harder, at Logan’s father for being who he is, at his mother for standing by, at all of the teachers who think they understand what he’s going through, at Miss James for making him think about what comes next when all he wants is to go backward. The events of the last year never happened – only water and waves and sand and sun.

After a few runs, Duncan drives them to school with the windows down and saltwater dries in their hair.

“You should leave her alone,” Duncan says finally.

Logan scoffs. He thinks of Veronica walking down the hall in those butch boots and dark clothes and that look in her eyes that shows she’s looking but not seeing anyone except herself, that attitude that says she’s better than all of them. She’s so changed from the girl who used to be Lilly’s best friend, it’s like she’s another person altogether. He liked it better when she was crying, guilty, hiding in the bathroom. She looks too clean, like she’s holding it together too well. He liked it better when he could still get to her, when he could see the reaction on her face. But the way she’s been staring at him or through him lately, silent, doesn’t give his anger anywhere to go. He liked it better when it was easier to hate her.

He doesn’t have an outlet. It’s like he’s using up all of his working memory to hold onto these thoughts: if he hadn’t kissed Yolanda, if Veronica hadn’t ratted, did Lilly even read his letter?, if their places were switched, Lilly wouldn’t be like _this_ over him, would she?

“What do you care? You dumped her,” Logan says.

Duncan’s knuckles tighten on the steering wheel. He turns into the parking lot and eases on the brake behind a group of students. Logan reaches over to the wheel and honks at them until they move to the side.

“You’re always just going to do whatever you want,” Duncan says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I have a few more one shots that I will be adding later.


End file.
